Shades of Gray in 6K.
Can’t resist milking the old Jewish joke: The pessimist says, “things couldn’t possibly get any worse.” To which the optimist replies, “Sure they could!”
Thus do we arrive at last week and Reed Hasting’s doomcast that linear TV has half a decade, mas o menos, before permanently checking into the roach motel. He’s not alone: linear’s demise has been predicted with metronomic regularity since at least 2001, with death-by-cable, internet, iTV, streaming, connected, and pure boredom sequentially identified as the murder weapon.
It's also true that his prognosis came alongside news that Netflix lost nearly a million subscribers in Q2. Hell, if your ship is listing sideways, why not bail a little bilge water on the other guys?
Regardless, the next shoe drop came from Shelly Palmer, one of the more insightful technology commentators, opining that Hastings will be either right or wrong based on the NFL. If it re-ups with one of the traditional bigs, all will be well in non-streaming screenland. If not, it’ll be retreads, reruns, and stale crumbs for the firms of Tiffany, Peacock & Murdoch.
Finally, we get to Monday’s news that the NFL is launching its own NFL+ streaming service, meaning that the warm hearts and charitable souls in pro football are likely salivating at the main chance—no need to share the cookie jar when you could, conceivably, snarf the whole thing, yourself.
If you know anything about the way sports got into and evolved on TV, they might have a shot. Or not. There’s a whole lot of evidence that Netflix’s woes have much to do with a version of the paradox of choice—while we may tell the researchers we want as many entertainment options as possible, we find ourselves overwhelmed by the profusion.
In that case, in fact, as a general matter, the only way out for linear TV is through: when your audience fish are scattered all over the entertainment (or advertising) pond you really do need a shinier lure. On that score, I love the remarkable Bob Brihn’s point that we need to realize that “interest span, not attention span, is the challenge.”
If you doubt his point, consider that the ONLY reason Netflix didn’t wind up reporting the much-anticipated loss of 2 million eyeball pairs was the fortuitous advent of the magnetic Stranger Things.
As to who’s got the better finger on the future pulse, maybe we agree that the answer is somewhere between all of the above and none. If the talking heads had it right, TV would have been on the wrong side of the dirt for at least a decade (see, also, advertising). Instead, the mélange just keeps getting murkier.
Nothing really changes, but it’s all different.
Did I mention what the optimist told the pessimist?
#advertising #media #attention #Netflix #ShellyPalmer